Silent Child(80)

“What are you doing, Aiden?” I said. “Why did you do that?”

But he didn’t answer.





40


“What have you done with Josie?”

Jake finally allowed me to stand, but he pushed me through the hallway by the crook of my elbow. I didn’t struggle, because I knew he was stronger and that if I tried anything, he’d have the upper hand. My mind was sharper than it had ever been, brought into focus from the adrenaline and anger coursing through me. If I was going to do anything about Jake’s attack, I would need to wait for the perfect moment, as hard as that would be while Rob was injured on the ground and Josie was nowhere to be seen.

“She’s a little tied up at the moment.” The corner of his mouth lifted in amusement.

“What are you going to do with me?” I asked.

Jake pushed me into the living room and gestured towards the sofa. “We’re going to talk. Aiden, why don’t you sit down next to your mother? And why don’t you make yourselves comfortable? Take off those coats, and while you’re at it, Emma, hand me your phone.”

I reluctantly did what he wanted. Jake threw my phone and Rob’s onto the Barratts’ carpet and stamped hard on the screens. Then he kicked them away into the corner of the room.

It sickened me to see the way Aiden obeyed him. Since my son had come back from the dead he’d had this strange way of doing whatever Jake asked of him. I’d never really understood it, but I’d put it down as some strange residual aftereffect of spending ten years of confinement at the hands of another man. But now? He had the choice to leave and he didn’t.

“You took Aiden,” I said.

Jake frowned. “That’s not what I want to talk about.”

“I loved you.”

“And I loved you, but look how you repaid me. You snuck around looking into my private things. You accused me of kidnapping your son.” Jake paced up and down the living room. I could see that he was wearing the same outfit he left for work in, but he’d removed his tweed jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his check shirt. There were droplets of blood on the collar of his shirt, up his neck, and splashed across his cheek.

“I don’t understand, Jake. I wasn’t… We were going to give it another go. Weren’t we? We’d talked and sorted it all out.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he spat. “You’ve been to my private space. You’ve seen the garage.”

My jaw dropped. “How do you know that?”

“Remember that phone I bought you for Christmas last year?”

I nodded. “My iPhone. Yeah.”

“It has a ‘Find My Phone’ app on it. I use it to watch your every move, Emma. I know how much you’ve been coming here, too. What’s that for? To complain about me? To talk about me behind my back?”

“No, Jake. I wouldn’t do that.” I heard the pulse of my blood thumping in my ears. I was short of breath and trying hard not to panic. Next to me, Aiden sat very still. I tried to keep calm. If I was calm, maybe I could calm Jake down. “I’m sorry if I betrayed your trust. I swear I never meant to, I just wanted to find out what happened to Aiden. Jake, why don’t you call an ambulance for Rob? We can say it was an accident. He fell and hit his head. We can sort all this out later, but Rob is bleeding to death in the hallway and he needs—”

“That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Ever since he’s come back to Bishoptown you’ve been lusting after him like a wide-eyed schoolgirl. It’s sick.” He paused and rubbed his temples. For one fleeting moment I thought about rushing him and knocking him down, but then he was back to pacing, and the determination on his face gave me caution. “There’s no way the waster survived that blow. I hit him with Hugh’s African warrior statue. The thing is made of stone.” Jake snatched the large stone figure and lifted it above his head. I flinched at the sight of Rob’s blood and hair smeared across the face of the African man.

“Hugh could come home at any time,” I said, forcing myself to keep my voice level and calm.

But Jake just laughed. “Hugh knows how to live. He takes whatever he wants, no matter what. He’ll be fucking some nineteen-year-old in Vegas or something. I like a man who takes what he wants.”

“You think that making a mockery of marriage vows is something to be proud of? You think that lying and cheating is admirable?”

“We do what we have to do to stay in polite society,” he said, sneering at the term. “But we all have desires, don’t we? We all have secrets deep down. I bet you didn’t know Hugh was screwing Amy Perry, did you?”

I frowned. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“She was wild in the sack, according to him. Into some real hard-core stuff. Not like you, my beautiful wife. But I didn’t marry you for your abilities between the sheets. You were broken, and I liked that. And no, I don’t mean when you jammed that knife into your wrist—I mean before then. Before Aiden, before everything. Even at school. I saw who you were before you knew it yourself. You needed guidance. You were like a baby deer walking on ice. Without someone by your side telling you where to step, you’d slip and slide around until you fell through the surface.” He had stopped pacing now. He seemed calmer, but that was even more unnerving than his agitated state. “You needed me, but you turned to that idiot in the hallway.”